has now been achieved. The problem is that sales have not met these expectations. BSC 1S now planning for an annual production of 15m Lones.
The story is repeated in the rest of the Common Market. Until a few years ago the EBC believed that in 1980 steei output in the hine countries would reach 228m tonnes. That projection has since been levelied to below 140m tonnes.
Steel workers There has been a corresponding drop in the consumption of steel in the EEC, which fell from a 1973 peak of 126m tonnes to just over 100m tonnes last year.
The Economist spelled out the implications for steel workers in West Europe.
EEC should sensibly aim for by the mid-1980s make gloomier reading newsnaner expected.
'If productivity is by then 500 tonnes per man year much better than now, acceptable by something like 200,000 jobs out of the present labour force of 510,000 (not including staff) should go':
This figure, the Economist added, is based on the 'most optimistic assumptions'.
The prospects States, where stee consumotion estimated to have dropped from 99m to 90m tonnes. United States Steel, the second largest steel company in the West, laid off 13,000 workers, and more are expected to go The problems facing Nippon Steel in Japan, the West's largest steel company, indicate the scale of the crisis affecting the steel industries in the advanced capitalist countries.
years ago Socialist Challenge 10 January 1980 Page 10 500450400'The latest of the sort of steel capacity than even this but barely world standards - that means are similar in the United last year • IS expanding ceiling."
тыва CONSUL ¡roductivo Potential 1001 Onsumption chairperson of Nippon Steel, said: 'From now on, there won't be much incentive for rapidly steel-making capacity.
advanced economies have reached the point where so-called prosperity has just about hit the Nippon Steel's advanced mills need high operating rates to realise the economies of scale which the mills are designed to achieve. Unit costs rise sharply Yoshihiro ‹ Inayama;) as production falls, which is the prospect now GERMAN steelworkers on strike last year for a 35-hour week and higher pay. The graph, showing the West's 'surplus' capacity, indicates why demands need to cross national frontiers.
facing Japan.
The product. technologically countries.
This arises not simply from the domestic effects of the economic crisis, but the declining demand for Japan's exports of steel, make up about a third of its sales A : major reason for this expanding steel production of the neo-colonial Several of these countries have established the basic industry which first underpinned the industrial revolution in the West -Market.
Headlong the problems DIUS CHILY this new philosophy that profits The FT is us as long as capitalism, wracked by controls.
Protectionism queue no loss of pay. which When, the in . campaign would be a tragedy.
And the logic for this headlong rush to solve 'so-called which the working class barely glimpsed? The Financial Times says it all "The combination of Davignon and the US trigger price does seem to have brought about more desirable than tonnes of steel produced.' wrong, though, about the originality of this philosophy. That's been with which scars a world material need ever-deepening cycles of 'over-production'.
The battle for wages and jobs, and still more the world-wide struggle to put an end to the capitalist system, are in no way enhanced by one of the favourite remedies of the Communist Party and the left in the Labour Party: import will sustain the productive capacity of the British steel industry. But it would help to put steelworkers in the rest of the West and in the Third World on the dole Aboveall, the raising of this demand by the labour movement would help to stave off a nightmare of the bosses: a campaign across national trontiers to counter the sackines and closures with the demand for worksharing with within the past 12 months, the German steelworkers struck for seven weeks for a 35-hour week and higher pay, and the French Longwy led hundred thousand-strong march against the closure of anything char cuts actoss the
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